


Poppies With The Dead

by Gypsylady



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Spoilers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Spoilers, fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 10:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1601948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gypsylady/pseuds/Gypsylady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only he who has eaten<br/>poppies with the dead<br/>will not lose ever again<br/>the gentlest chord.<br/>― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus</p><p>Read no further if you aren't up to at least episode 20 of Agents of Shield season 1.</p><p> </p><p>Ward thought he'd killed Koenig. Simmons examined the body; she was sure Ward had killed Koenig. No one had counted on Koenig's secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poppies With The Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Edited because I found some awkward sentences I wanted to fix. And because I WASN'T JOSSED! I even managed to make sense. Which, if you haven't seen the MAoS season finale, will not make sense to you. I am chortling with glee.
> 
> I have a crush on Lewis Black. Due to this crush I watched Root of All Evil incessantly. From this I developed a fondness for Patton Oswalt. I know it's traditional for Joss Whedon to kill off beloved characters but killing Koenig made me sadder than usual. As sad as the death of Coulson in Avengers 1. And seeing as how Coulson bounced back, I figured Koenig could, too. And this is how I propose to do it.
> 
> Oh, and explain where the hell Clint was during Cap2 and the aftermath of all that while I was at it.
> 
> Work is unbeta'd at this time. It could use a beta but I can't coerce anyone just now and I kinda feel this is time sensitive. Anyone wants to crit my grammar or style, go for it. Just please be kind.
> 
> Insert usual disclaimer here

The moment Shield's Director Nick Fury recognized that he was suspicious of the origins and goals of Project Insight he sent one of his top operatives to liaise with Tony Stark. Stark had, after all, managed to infiltrate Shield's computers at least once. Since he was on the list of proposed targets Fury had gotten from the data purloined by Agent Romanoff on the Lemurian Star, it stood to reason that Stark would want to contribute to the investigation. 

But that's a story for another time. 

 

===============================

 

Shield Agent Eric Koenig was unwavering in his loyalty to the organization. He had thrown himself into Shield operations with near obsessive focus from the moment he finished his training at the academy. He caught the eye of recently appointed Director Nick Fury, who recognized in the young man an iron will that most failed to see. Most people saw a slight, rotund fellow with a sardonic wit and a predilection for violent war movies. Fury saw a man who would fight on the side of what was good to the very end. 

Director Fury also knew Koenig's secret, the one fact about himself that he had successfully hidden from nearly all background checks. The only other person in Shield to know Koenig's secret was Steve Rogers, the Captain America of history whose opinion of Koenig's fitness for duty was the only one Fury cared about. It was that secret that made him an ideal person to put in charge of an isolated outpost base, and it was that secret that would someday startle all of Agent Phil Coulson's team. But that moment was yet to come. 

The worst moment after Grant Ward killed him came when Koenig first started to regain consciousness. He was lying on a table in the medical facility of Providence Base. For a moment he worried that someone was performing an autopsy on him. The noises coming from outside the room were loud and seemed hostile. He opened his eyes slowly, and assessed his circumstances. He was alone in the infirmary. It was dark, with only the dim nightlights over the pharmaceutical cabinet to see by. The voices he could hear from outside the room sounded military. Then he recognized Assistant Director Hill's voice. This, he reflected, could be good or bad. And Mama Koenig had not raised him to take foolish risks. He rose slowly and, moving quietly, opened a drawer that looked like it was meant for a morgue. 

Koenig slid feet first into the drawer and softly pulled the door shut behind himself. He lay in the full dark and silence of the coffin like enclosure for a full minute, listening for anything threatening. Satisfied that he'd been undetected, he kicked out with one foot, opening another door. Light poured in and he slipped into a small room with surveillance screens on three of the walls. There was no door, and once he'd closed the cover of the drawer's foot wall there was no apparent way in or out. Where the opening into the drawer had been there was a screen showing the infirmary. 

Koenig's escape had not been a moment too soon. The door to the infirmary burst open and a pair of Air Force security officers swept in, turning on all the lights and pointing weapons at any inanimate object they thought might be mistaken for a person. Koenig considered laughing. But even though he knew, had verified, the room he was in was totally soundproofed, he practiced discretion out of habit. 

These guys were thorough, he had to give them that. They checked the three morgue drawers as well as all the cabinets. They even pushed on the mirrors to see if they could be hiding anything. But it only took about ten minutes for them to be satisfied that the room was empty and they left. 

For a moment Koenig worried they would report back and one of Coulson's crew would blurt out something about there being a corpse missing. But then he saw Hill and Coulson in the library turning on Talbot and his team. He heard a reference to Hill's plane and to Los Angeles. A half hour later, he saw Talbot regrouping, and heard him calling in for backup to help him dismantle the base. This, Koenig decided, was his signal to leave. 

The trap door in the floor was obvious once you knew what to look for. The tiles were alternating black and white. In the center of the floor they came together in a set of four black tiles. Triggered by remote control, the panel opened silently. It was a tight fit for the round little man but Koenig made it through without a sound, and the panel shut securely behind him. He took the remote control with him but he had no doubt Talbot's team could find a way to open the trap door without too much effort. He wasn't in imminent danger, but he couldn't take too long to get out. 

The ladder he climbed down was sturdy but the trip down was slow in the dark. When he felt his feet touch the concrete at the bottom, he felt around the nearest wall until he found a light switch. 

It wasn't a bright light but it was enough for him to see where he was going. The tunnel he was in had no side branches although it did twist in different directions every few feet. He'd studied the plans and knew his goal was less than one hundred yards from the bottom of the ladder. But that was a relative measurement. The distance he'd have to walk, with all the twists and turns, would total just under one hundred fifty yards. 

At the end of the tunnel he found his snowmobile. Fury had tried to talk him into a four wheel drive truck but Koenig has been certain any escaping he had to do was going to be done in snow. He opened the door into a small patch of trees and pulled the snowmobile out onto the snow. 

He smiled at the quiet engine. Snowmobiles don't have to be noisy annoyances, he'd explained to Fury. He had no idea how Stark Industries was convinced to develop the quiet electric engine, and so far he hadn't seen it marketed. But it was his favorite toy. All the past winter, in between bouts of video games, he had taken the snowmobile out and explored his surroundings. He already had an escape plan figured out, had had one for months. 

By the time he walked into the town at the bottom of the mountain, he was cold and his suit was rumpled. He was zipped up in a fur-trimmed parka, but knowing his appearance under it was unkempt made him grumpy. He checked on bus schedules and found he had six hours to wait. There was a restaurant connected to the small vacation lodge at the edge of town, so he settled in at the bar for lunch. 

The television was showing an American news channel. Enough time had passed that there were no longer any breaking news segments about the destruction of the Triskelion. Instead, there were pundits on all points along the political spectrum. He was almost lulled into relaxing when he heard a particularly vehement commentator say, "And for all we know, Shield Director Fury is alive, just hiding out. I know if I were Fury, I'd be hiding out." 

Koenig was a good agent but he was tired and he jerked his head up to gaze at the television. He recognized the speaker as known as a blowhard, and not someone likely to have any kind of inside information. He forced himself to relax and aimed for subtlety as he scanned the room to see if anyone had noticed. As he returned his attention to his quiche he spotted a man in a plaid jacket and cap moving across the room towards him. His hand inched towards his pocket where he had secreted one of Coulson's ICERs. It had seemed more sensible than a regular gun at the time he took it. Now he hoped he was right. 

The man slid into a chair at Koenig's table. "I heard you need a ride," he said. 

Koenig sank back into his seat. "Barton. Jesus, you scared the crap out of me." 

"I try," Clint Barton said, grinning. "But Fury pulled me out of New York to help you out. He heard rumors about a raid on Providence and sent me to extract you. I've got a fabulous wreck of a truck out there. What do you say we have us a road trip back to New York?" 

Koenig gave him a hard look. "I have no time for that kind of nonsense. Something is going down in Los Angeles and I need to back up Cou...I mean Hill." 

Barton's eyebrows raised. "Either name you just said is a red flag, man. Hill works for Stark now. Coulson--you mean Phil Coulson, right?--is dead. He is dead, right?" 

Koenig grunted. "You seem to know something about it, what do you think?" 

"Fury said you were one of the few he told about Coulson. He didn't give me details but he said the rumors of Coulson's death were greatly exaggerated. And he told me not to try to talk to him. Which, believe me, has not been easy." 

"So now we head to Los Angeles to back him up, right?" 

Barton shook his head. "No, we don't. Coulson thinks you're dead. We aren't going to drop this kind of a surprise on him in the middle of a major op. Let's not add to the problem, okay? On the way, could you explain how you're alive? Fury and Coulson I get but you not so much." 

It wasn't easy to accept, but Koenig realized Barton was right. Surprising Coulson, himself a surprise back from the dead, was not a good plan right now. He nodded. "But can we stop for poutine before we leave Canada?" he asked. "I can't believe it's not on the menu here." 

Barton rolled his eyes but agreed. 

They were almost into Hamilton when Koenig finally explained his survival, his secret. First he explained the stop for poutine. 

"You probably either won't believe me or you won't believe I'm loyal to Shield and to Fury so I want to be sure to get something that sticks to my ribs before you kick me out of the truck and make me walk. Or worse." He pulled a photograph out of his wallet. It was an old, somewhat yellowed picture of a beautiful young woman with blonde hair and light eyes. "That was my mother, Gertrud Koenig. She was never a Nazi, she was just a beautiful girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. The Nazi ideal, remember? She caught the wrong person's attention and ended up being dragged all over Germany during the War...." 

"She had you late in life?" Barton guessed. 

"Hardly. My story, now, so shut up," Koenig snarled. "She had my sister Ilsa when a high ranking SS officer decided he needed a mistress. Kicked her to the curb when Ilsa was born with brown eyes. Or so she told me later. Ilsa was sent to live with cousins on a farm somewhere. Mama caught the eye of another high ranking Nazi and off she was dragged again. Only this one wasn't looking for romance." 

He took a breath and stared out the truck window. "Say, Clint, you mind slowing down some? This is the bit where you kick me out of the truck and I don't want it to hurt when I bounce." 

"You keep saying I'm going to do that, Eric, but you don't say why." 

"Because the person who took my mother was Johann Schmidt, later known as Red Skull. The monster who founded Hydra." 

"And?" 

"And he took her to see if he could breed a super soldier with her." 

Barton slowly steered the truck to the shoulder. Once it had come to a complete stop he turned and faced Koenig. "You've just suggested two impossible things. One: the super soldier serum does not transfer to offspring. They did some pretty thorough tests on Cap both in the forties and now. And Steve told me he will never father children for fear they'll inherit most of his childhood ailments. Two: you're not old enough to have been born that far back and I have high enough clearance to know we didn't have anyone on ice. So tell me the damn truth, Eric. What happened?" 

"I don't actually remember being rescued." Koenig glared at Barton defiantly. "But Cap has since told me that Dernier and Jones took turns carrying me and I was a squirmy handful. My mother was too exhausted to help. Half the time Cap carried her. Barnes figured out how to jury rig diapers. I was four months old. 

"Schmidt had given one of his science teams until I was six months old to decide if I carried any of the super soldier serum in me. The Howling Commandos saved my mother and me first. Schmidt had planned to kill us both if I didn't have any super powers. Thankfully, he never found out. 

"The serum does transfer to offspring, no matter what the scientists who tested Cap thought. I don't have enough of the serum in me to make me tall and strong and Cap-like. And thankfully there isn't enough for me to lose my face like Schmidt did. But I have an amazing healing factor. The bastard that garroted me did a pretty thorough job. As I was going under I wasn't sure I'd make it back. But I did. I was born in 1944. I'm not sure how old my body thinks it is. I obviously didn't turn out to be a perfect physical specimen and if Schmidt were alive today he'd probably kill me as permanently as he could. Or at least he’d try. My main strength is how hard I am to kill. I’m immune to most diseases. Bruises heal almost instantaneously. I can go a good half day without breathing and not suffer brain damage. I’ve had to do it twice."

The following silence was long and awkward. 

“So,” Barton finally said. "You're sure about the no brain damage thing? Because I remember you on an op in Argentina..."

The look Koenig shot him was offended and amused at the same time. "We good, Barton?" Koenig asked. "You don't think I'm delusional or whatever?"

Barton smiled ruefully. "I had a Norse demi-god take over my brain before the Battle of New York. I watched the Hulk, the fucking HULK, save Tony Stark's life. On purpose. I read the reports on how Coulson is still alive. You? Your story's got nothing on what I've seen in the past couple of years. I'm just glad you're on our side."

Koenig grinned. "Good. Because it's cold out there and walking would have been uncomfortable."

“I hear ya there," Clint replied. "So. You think we need a spreadsheet of who knows who is alive?"

Koenig pulled a Starkpad from his parka's front pocket. "Already started."

Barton rolled his eyes. "Shoulda guessed. Hey, Eric, did you know that girl Cap was mooning over back in the day?” 

“Aunt Peggy?” Koenig asked. And as he started explaining how he’d known Peggy Carter, Barton put the truck back in gear and they headed off towards the U.S. border.

**Author's Note:**

> I am being canon compliant here. The serum that kept Nick Fury Sr alive for way longer than necessary (did I say that out loud? Oops!) was passed to his son. Senior had to have regular injections. Junior just has it in him.


End file.
